Dorothy Malone Dies: Oscar Winner, ‘Peyton Place’ Star Was 92
Dorothy Malone, who won a best supporting actress Oscar for her performance in 1956’s Written on the Wind and starred as matriarch Constance MacKenzie on 1960s TV series Peyton Place, has died.
Malone died Friday morning in Dallas of natural causes, her manager, Burt Shapiro confirmed to Deadline. She was 92.
Malone began her decades-long career in 1943 with small roles in films such as Frank Sinatra musicals Higher and Higher (1943) and Step Lively (1944), and Show Business (1944) with Eddie Cantor and George Murphy. She began to get bigger roles in the 1950s, leading to her most praised film performance as boozed-up nymphomaniac Marylee Hadley in 1956’s Written on the Wind, a role for which she earned a best supporting actress Oscar. Her other films included 1957’s Man of a Thousand Faces, in which she played the unsympathetic first wife of James Cagney’s Lon Chaney Sr, and as alcoholic actress Diana Barrymore in the biographic melodrama Too Much, Too Soon (1958).
She segued to television in the 1960s, with perhaps her most memorable role as over-protective single mother Constance MacKenzie in primetime soap Peyton Place, which ran from 1964-1968.
Her other TV credits included ABC’s circus drama The Greatest Show on Earth, starring Jack Palance, TV movies Murder in Peyton Place (1977) and Peyton Place: The Next Generation (1985), and a featured role in the 1976 miniseries Rich Man, Poor Man.
Her final film credit was a cameo in the 1992 thriller Basic Instinct as a friend to Sharon Stone.
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